There are several reasons for a method not to have a method body:

• It is an unintentional omission, and should be fixed to prevent an unexpected behavior in production.
• It is not yet, or never will be, supported. In this case an UnsupportedOperationException should be thrown.
• The method is an intentionally-blank override. In this case a nested comment should explain the reason for the blank override.

Noncompliant Code Example

public void doSomething() {
}

public void doSomethingElse() {
}

Compliant Solution

@Override
public void doSomething() {
  // Do nothing because of X and Y.
}

@Override
public void doSomethingElse() {
  throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
}

Exceptions

This does not raise an issue in the following cases:

• Non-public default (no-argument) constructors
• Public default (no-argument) constructors when there are other constructors in the class
• Empty methods in abstract classes
• Methods annotated with @org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Pointcut()

public abstract class Animal {
  void speak() {  // default implementation ignored
  }
}